This repository provides an example on how to make your interaction data available through Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI, http://globalbioticinteractions.org).

If you have comments or questions please open an issue.

Share Your Interaction Data

If you want to share your own data through GloBI:

1. Fork this repository.
2. Edit your README.rd to describe your data in a human readable form.
3. Ensure that your README.rd contains a reference to http://globalbioticinteractions.org.
4. Edit your globi.json to provide a machine readable description of your dataset (e.g. citation, license, version, files, format).

After you do this, the data will be available through GloBI within a day or so.

Data Format and Dictionary

The file interactions.tsv is a suggestion on how to encode your interaction data using a tab separated file format (tsv) in combination with columns described below. This provides an example on how to capture your data in a human and machine friendly way and keep it relatively doable to update the file using a basic text editor. Other formats are supported, just let us know about the syntax, and we'll make it work.

Each term has two columns: one for an id and another for a label. The former is to make the term machine readable, the latter to make is easy to read for humans. With both id and name present possible typos or other transcription errors can be detected with a (somewhat) straightforward algorithm.

term	example	description
sourceTaxonId	EOL:328583	taxon classification id of originating organism in some taxon name authority
sourceTaxonName	Enhydra lutris	scientific name of taxon classification of originating organism
interactionTypeId	RO:0002470	id of interaction as described by the OBO Relations Ontology
interactionTypeName	eats	human readable description of interactions
targetTaxonId	EOL:1971	taxon classification id of originating organisms
targetTaxonName	Echinoidea	scientific name of taxon classification of target organism of interaction
LocationinhostName	On tube feet	The location of the host where the parasite is found
localityId	GEONAMES:5391961	reference to geo classification like geonames.org, gazetteer or other.
localityName	San Francisco Bay, California, USA	human readable description of locale
decimalLatitude	-41.0983423	latitude of geographic center of interaction observation location http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#decimalLatitude
decimalLongitude	-121.1761111	longtide of geographic center of interaction observation location http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#decimalLongitude
observationDateTime	2014-11-18T06:37:04Z	ISO 8601 formatted date time string
referenceDoi	doi:10.3354/dao002147	Digital Object Id (DOI, http://doi.org) is commonly used to give papers, datasets or other digital object a permanent id
referenceCitation	Jangoux, M. 1986 Diseases of Echinodermata. I. Agents microorganisms and protistans Diseases of Aquatic Organisms (Impact Factor: 1.59) 2:147-162. doi:10.3354/dao002147	human readable reference

Term Id Sources

Rather than only supplying a name for a taxon and/or locality, a reference to some established taxonomy and/or geo database is preferred. Commonly used taxon id sources include, but are not limited to GBIF, EOL, ITIS and WoRMS. Geo database or vocabularies include geonames and Gazetteer Ontology.

Interaction Id Cheatsheet

For more terms, please see OBO Relations Ontology.

interactionTypeId	interactionTypeName
RO:0002470	eats
RO:0002444	parasite of
RO:0002456	pollinates
RO:0002556	pathogen of